Let’s take a moment to picture this scenario. You’re currently playing the new First-Person Shooter (FPS) game that’s focusing on the trench warfare of World War I (WWI). You just went through the tutorial and you start playing the first stage, you encounter several enemies and try to shoot at them…

Wait a moment. You just got shot multiple times. How are you still standing and not dead?

You scramble to cover and find tucked in a corner a medpack. You rush over to go grab it… and somehow at the speed of sound you emptied the entire contents of the medpack and healed yourself back to full health, as if you weren’t just shot a whole bunch.

You find this very weird since the game said it would be a realistic depiction of WWI, so you move on to another game. This new game is a survival game where you need to build and forage in order to survive. You start the game up and…

Wait, how are you building all these structures so quickly with so little materials? How are able to make full course meals with just a few things you had on your hand? How are you able to physically carry all these things you have been picking up without any issue? What is going on?

These instances you have just experienced are referred to as Acceptable Breaks From Reality, or Breaks for short, and they are more or less essential when making games. There are certain elements of both story and gameplay where realism would make it either tedious, difficult or confusing for the audience. In order to change these elements, there are workarounds that will make them more unrealistic to a blatant point, and no one really minds. There are a number of reasons why they exist, so let’s take a moment to go through the obvious ones.

The main reason is rather obvious. Reality, compared to gaming, is boring. Sure there are a lot of things you can do in real life that can keep you entertained, but for video games it’s a different thing entirely. The main appeal of games is to be in the action right away, to go from point A to point B as quickly as you can or accomplish whatever task it’s telling you to do. You don’t want to be held back because the game is making you wait several hours for it to finish cooking that pot of roast you were making.

That’s why most games remove many aspects of reality from games, so players don’t have to wait needlessly long hours to just continue playing.

FPS games as mentioned in the scenario are built around the fast-paced combat and going from one spot to another very quickly. Even when you get shot a bunch, unless it is directly in the head, you still have a chance to react and fight back. Having a system in the game that lets you automatically regenerate your health when enough time passes or picking up medpacks that heal you instantly are good ways to help you keep up with the fast pace action.

If reality was thrown into the gameplay, we would see games where dying once removes your entire save file forcing you to start all over, or spending several weeks to a few months in a hospital recovering. Neither one is something that you want to see in a game.

Let’s go back to the survival game as mentioned in the scenario. While it does seem silly to make the structures and food so much faster than you would in real life, it makes sense for the game. If you were to spend the actual amount of time building a single hut or a simple meal, the interest in the game would fall completely. Again, no one wants to spend that much time doing something in the game, so why not make it easier for the player?

Another reason as to why these breaks exist is because of memory and time. Games require plenty of memory in order to run things, and too much used up will either slow down the game or make it crash completely. That’s why most games will make enemies disappear when they are beaten, because having them remain on screen would take up more memory.

For time, that’s primarily for the time spent making the game. Developers spend a long amount of time making games, and in some cases they will try to find a shortcut for some parts of the game so that they can spend more time working on other parts. Games that have multiple weapons like swords or axes but having the same model is one such example, as it would take a very long time to individually design each and every weapon. This isn’t noticeable now, but it was more common for games to do this over a decade ago.

There are several other examples of reality being broken in order to make the game as it is. Monsters giving you money or items when they physically shouldn’t be able to carry them. Human characters having an absurdly high jump or even able to double jump when in reality no one could jump that high. Features in the game that while don’t make sense story wise are purely there to keep the player from getting frustrated. Items being placed in rather bizarre spots that they shouldn’t be in.

Sometimes however, these breaks can be obstructive. If they become too much, it’s possible for them to get in the way of enjoying the game. Some media creators will even go further and not use some of these breaks due to having different tolerances between abstraction and simulation. These games made by these creators however wind up being more catered to a niche audience, and even then there are still measures taken to prevent things from getting too boring.

The best way to simplify it is this; if what is happening on screen is something that isn’t possible in real life, then it’s a break from reality.

The only type of games that actually do not take shortcuts with time spent doing stuff are mobile games or simulation games. This is primarily because they are built to be played on a daily basis, with most mobile games giving you daily rewards for doing so. Simulation games, especially ones revolving around management or construction, require long hours of playing in order to “level up” and have access to more resources to continue playing.

So now you are a bit more familiar with this trope and what exactly it entails. It’s honestly very surprising just how many breaks exist and how often we take them for granted or just ignore since they make gaming easier. And with video games continuing to be made with new ideas being implemented or old ones being improved on, we can definitely be seeing more of these Breaks in the near future.